Thursday, November 13, 2008

Wendel Moment #8 - Ho hum, Clark just killed some guy

On November 22, Wendel Clark's #17 will be raised to the rafters as the team honours its former captain and arguably the most popular player in franchise history.

In the lead up to that night, Down Goes Brown will feature a countdown of Wendel's Top 17 Greatest Moments.


I have a dilemma.

On the one hand, any list of Wendel Clark's greatest moments has to include some of his patented knockouts. On the other hand, there are so many to choose from, and they all start to blend together after a while. Let's face it, if I included every fight that involved Wendel Clark destroying somebody, this list would be a top 17,000.

Put it this way: I ran a search for "wendel +clark +leafs +fight +ko +beating +'opponent ends up twitching on ice' ", and Google came back with "Too many results. Please try something with fewer results, such as 'porn'."

So choosing just one generic beatdown to represent all the others is a daunting task. But for whatever reason, this one against David Mackey always stuck with me.



By the way, for pure comedy purposes be sure to check out this link to the exact same fight as called by the North Stars play-by-play team. Even as Mackey's corpse is being dragged off the ice, they still insist he did pretty well and can't figure out why the fans are cheering.

Incidentally, the Mackey fight is often confused with a separate North Stars scrap vs. Bob Brooke, which is the infamous fight where Clark ends up on top of the guy and beats him to death. Here's a video of that fight, apparently rendered on a Commodore 64:



Note the way Clark gives him a few mild shots, almost daring him to take a swing. When Brooke does, Clark is on him right away. By the third punch, Brooke's widow had already remarried and moved on with her life.

And finally, here's a fight with the similarly named David Maley. Different guy. Different team. Same result.




18 comments:

  1. these are all awesome DGB. That second clip is scary. Wendel was ferocious, glad he was on our side. Can't imagine us having picked someone else at #1 and then having to face him for the next 15 years or so...

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  2. That Mackey fight where he hurts his knee happened to me in a ball hockey fight. I got hit so hard, my knee buckled and I ended up not only tearing the hell out of my knee but also cracking my head against the concrete on the way down. So I feel Mackey's pain. Well, I guess about 1/100th of what he felt at the hands of God.

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  3. Wendel is a beneficient god. He understands that your list is not the be-all and end-all but just one mortal's attempt to understand his brilliance. So he won't punch all of your blood out if the top 5 aren't right.

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  4. Wendel was a different kind of man. He made other men look like empty paper bags.

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  5. I loved the way Wendel used to fight. Never content to just win the fight, he tried to kill the guy and then swallow his soul.

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  6. That Mackey fight where he hurts his knee happened to me in a ball hockey fight.

    Why would you ever pick a fight with Wendel Clark at road hockey?

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  7. Why would you ever pick a fight with Wendel Clark at road hockey?

    It was a battle of the moustaches. And I lived to tell about it, what does that say?

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  8. Re: video two

    The play-by-play announcer saying 'And Clark working over Brooke pretty good' is equivalent to a coroner saying 'this body that just went through a wood chipper is in a couple of pieces.'

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  9. And it wasn't road hockey. It was ball hockey. With refs and all, including Lou Franceschetti (I shit you not).

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  10. That Mackey fight from the North Stars POV was pretty funny. "When a guy goes down, you don't pile on him like that." Ummm...yeah, Mackey went down like a pile of bricks and took Clark with him.

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  11. look at the Mackey fight at about 0:01; that right hand from God literally explodes Mackey's helmet off his head.

    As a general rule of thumb, I think if you are in a fight with someone, and their first punch knocks your lid about 40 feet in the air...you've made an awful, awful mistake.

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  12. Wendel had an endorsement deal with NASA. Mackey's helmet is now passing through Neptune's orbit and transmitting photos back to Earth.

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  13. My god I'd give my soul to the devil to have Clark play one more shift with the Leafs. Preferably vs alfredsson. Oh my..clark destroying his little body into anti-matter would be mucho pleasureful.

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  14. Wendel really likes to use the ground & pound strategy.

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  15. One thing that you might remember in the post-event drama of the Bob Brooke fight:

    The next time the Leafs faced the stars, Dennis Maruk cross-checked Clark in the face in the first period, and received a 5-minute high-sticking penalty. Maruk was, coincidentally, scheduled for an interview in the 1st intermission. During the interview, he just nonchalantly brushed off the cross-check as an accident, saying he deserved the 5 minutes because he got the stick up.

    Later, the league reviewed the play, and realized that the hit was premeditated, and Maruk was suspended for (if I remember correctly) 5 games. It was, basically, revenge for the beating on Brooke, which many Stars felt was overly-aggressive due to Brooke being down on the ice while Clark mercilessly pummeled him.

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